While Lawrence Booth’s posts sometimes nestle next to ours on the Wisden Cricketer blog, we’ve never actually spoken to him, so you can be assured of our impartiality.

Cricket, Lovely Cricket? An Addict’s Guide To The World’s Most Exasperating Game is officially recommended.It’s kind of an overview of the game as it currently stands; a primer to tell you everything you really need to know. Not the rules or the records, but the culture of the game.

As we read it, we continually thought it was the kind of book we’d try and foist onto a friend who didn’t like the sport to trick them into entering our world. ‘See, it’s not shit,’ would be our implicit message. But if you’re worried it’s a book for those new to cricket, it’s not.

We probably read more cricket writing than most, but there were plenty of good stories in here that we’d never heard before and Booth’s also a writer who’s not averse to sneaking out the kinds of stories that cricketers and cricket writers usually keep to themselves.

A man who writes a chapter on the language of cricket has to know the clichés well enough to steer clear of them and Booth is a writer who seems like he thinks about each of his sentences. We’re not sure he could write a duff cricket book. Buy it from Amazon, if you haven’t got a copy already.